To the Bone
by crackinthecup
Summary: 'Let's get you inside,' Celebrimbor was murmuring, solicitous and deluded at his ear. 'You feel chilled to the bone.' — Maeglin is haunted by what was, by what will be. Celebrimbor can but try to reach that deep. Fallen Banners.


**A/N:** Written as a birthday present for the wonderful alackofghosts on Tumblr.

 **Warnings:** breath play; slight mentions of torture and gore.

* * *

Sunset was a kiss and a blush, the glow of white walls dimming as stars preened into brightness overhead. Maeglin did not turn to them. He did not turn to alleys pulsing with light, to the peals of laughter in the rooftop garden across the street, to the patter of footsteps on the stairs behind.

He turned to the peaks of the Echoriath and thought them the gaping maw of a beast of strength and stone.

So Morgoth had seemed too. Ash, ash, ash—the Vala's body had coughed it up as a guttering volcano, through every pore and every word, a blackened scrape over Maeglin's cheekbone as with such hideous tenderness he had lifted his face to _see_ the mold of those fatal syllables on his lips.

 _''Ah, yet it is not_ him _you desire, is it, son of_ _Eöl_ _?''_

His lying tongue had failed, as all things must, under the lightning of Morgoth's gaze. The creature's lieutenant had advised that it not fail again amidst the cheer of Gondolin. When Maeglin responded that its cheer was not meant for him, his lies had long curdled and soured, clumps and fragments, futile but for the nausea of their failure.

So constant was that nausea that it hardly ever registered anymore. Except—

Celebrimbor did not speak as he drew close to Maeglin. He did not speak because he knew it jarred and juddered. He knew not to touch, not yet— _not ever_ ; as the lieutenant had peeled flesh off and lapped at the rawness beneath, so Maeglin had needled that conviction within his skin as the hooves of his horse had stirred Anfauglith out of dust and death; he had determined to pretend, a skill far too often in use to ever rust, honed as all and sundry had watched and had been none the wiser—but Celebrimbor he would not tackle down into further injury.

Yet the dust had muffled sound, and the stars had wheeled with no care for the trackless miles, and to Maeglin it had seemed that his steed jolted over the same tiny patch of desolation over and over and over—

Yet beneath the heat of Celebrimbor's palms his conviction had melted, his thighs had splayed, and _yes_ , he had found himself chanting, _yes_ —just for a little while, and though Morgoth's voice had crooned in his mind, _borrowed time_ , it had relished, the staccato of Celebrimbor's breath had been louder.

Maeglin had not ceased melting since. His limbs were stuffed with snow, a chill and a torrent, _I'm sorry_ flooding his throat, _drowning_ him—

 _I'm sorry._ Maeglin raised his face to the stars, crisp air shuddering into his lungs, to quell his nausea. Celebrimbor reached for his hand, fingers twining through Maeglin's own, and the familiarity of the gesture twisted like mangled steel in Maeglin's chest. _Their_ balcony, they had foolishly proclaimed it one night when mulled wine seeped into tissue and thought. Few ever sought it; the stairs wound and narrowed, a curlicue of stone around the easternmost tower of the palace. Their _eyrie_ , they had joked, for below the city fluxed, awnings flapped in the Great Market, voices swelled and ebbed amidst the tinkle of fountains, and further still, as the eye drifted, as the voice hushed, the hunched spine of mountains, the spearing cry of eagles. Maeglin had forsworn all right to it.

''Lómion, I—''

Days it had been since Celebrimbor had first touched his tongue to the sentences in quiet rehearsal—days wafting of ash and metal, hammering the syllables into blades, daggers tapering into delicate sharpness, splashing each gleam of light into a rivulet of silver. Celebrimbor had watched them bubble and warp in the crucible, re-molded, re-forged, only to be scrapped once more. Rog had not remarked upon how Celebrimbor's weekly allotment of metal kept renewing itself. A mere glance he had offered, a firmer pat on the back.

Maeglin heard not a word of it. _''Child of the Twilight,''_ the lieutenant had mused, yanking him out of his lord's sight on a leash, _''you thrive in perpetual darkness, do you not?''_ Maeglin had not answered, and a sigh had sweetened out of those cruel lips. _''Words shall spill, Lómion, and you shall claw them out yourself.''_ Heat had blistered over his skin as the Maia had willed his manacles open with a word that hooked into bone and scraped out the marrow—so that he might be unimpeded in bloodying himself against rock, as Maeglin had too soon discovered. A shove and a tumble, and into a hole scooped out of the entrails of the mountains Maeglin had cracked in a sprawl. A metal grating had been secured over the aperture with another word of power and then—

Then blackness that breathed, silence that rang. Blind and deaf he had huddled, and the words had welled.

Maeglin felt arms engulf him. His head lolled over the familiar slope of a shoulder and if his fingers spasmed into Celebrimbor's tunic—it was not mentioned.

''Let's get you inside," Celebrimbor was murmuring, solicitous and deluded at his ear. ''You feel chilled to the bone.''

 _I am,_ Maeglin did not say. His bones were hollow and his chest dank and dripping as a cavern. Morgoth had voided all, had sapped him to crawling knees and spouting lips. It would be easy to say one crushed their own hope into the stone with each step further into the bowels of Angband; that resistance was but a stage in a continuum that must end in submission. Maeglin did not believe a word of it.

He felt himself coaxed away, dizzied on a whirlwind pathway, and then Celebrimbor was guiding him into the couch, pressing a goblet of wine into his palm. Hesitation had no place in those silver eyes, yet there it was as Celebrimbor did not quite curl himself around Maeglin. He seated himself at his side, still not quite touching, one leg tucked underneath the other, and ghosted an arm over Maeglin's shoulders. Maeglin twitched forward to slide his goblet onto the table and that arm retracted in an awkward drag along the cushions.

They did not speak. Maeglin sensed the words squeezing through Celebrimbor's throat and smothered them into silence with his lips. He sank back into the couch, pulling Celebrimbor with him, and Celebrimbor's burgeoning hardness was cradled between the spread of his legs. Garments were shrapnel across the floor; relief hungered upon Celebrimbor's lips as he soldered them to Maeglin's own. _This_ —

This was still easy. Slick sounds and crashing hearts and touches that blazed down to the bone. When Celebrimbor entered him, Maeglin felt himself diced down to the fullness of him, thoughtlessly raw through the roll of his hips.

He clasped Celebrimbor's hand to him. Kisses he secreted between the knuckles, a flutter of lips over his aching pulse, and tenderly, earnestly, he fitted those callused fingers to his throat. Celebrimbor's hips stuttered with a gasping rush of air into his lungs; he did not remove his hand.

''I have no wish to hurt you,'' he whispered, and Maeglin's fingers fretted at his wrist.

 _You will,_ Maeglin did not say. Instead—

''Please, Tyelpë,'' because to offer justification would be damnation. (What would it matter, now?) Because Celebrimbor would not refuse.

Celebrimbor's breath gusted to a standstill in his throat as though he could not quite pack it into words. The fingers tightened, ground down just below Maeglin's chin, and Maeglin's throat was stoppered to anything but a wheeze and a rasp of air. He did not struggle, not even when a tingle swelled in his lips, when pressure battered behind his eyeballs. The pallor of his cheeks purpled, and though Celebrimbor made to pull away, Maeglin's fingers sharpened around his wrist.

''No,'' he choked out, and Celebrimbor sighed from somewhere above him. The world was spinning around the drumbeat in his head, all touch flummoxed into nebulous sensation; it was but with dim awareness that he felt Celebrimbor speed up, capture his drooling length in practiced strokes.

Maeglin spilled with something too desperate to be a mewl. The twitch in his muscles had not yet mellowed when Celebrimbor whipped his hand away from his throat; when Celebrimbor leaned down, touching kisses to his brow, gentling his cheek into his palm. As air needled back into Maeglin's lungs, diaphragm contracting into bottomlessness, he felt Celebrimbor's rhythm falter into tender little oscillations. His grip about Celebrimbor's shoulders was slack, but still Celebrimbor melted into him, and he pressed the prickle at the corners of his eyes into his shoulder.

''Is anything the matter?'' The murmur fluted along his hairline and Maeglin let it stray. _No, nothing at all_ —the lie was not hollow, this time; it trembled with emotion, and Maeglin willed his fictitious cave-in into truth, willed the horror of his capture into some impotent nightmare recess; willed himself far from light and laughter and the longing that quivered with every meld of Celebrimbor's flesh into his own.

He did not see Celebrimbor's frown. His limbs were too watery to hold Celebrimbor through his climax. Celebrimbor did not sigh into his hair, or trail lazy lips down his jaw, down the arch of his neck; he pieced himself away to sit back on his haunches, and something in Maeglin's chest wrenched—each time he gentled Celebrimbor away, he bruised with the dread of finality.

Yet Celebrimbor reached for him again, and Maeglin could not help breathing a little easier for it. He was led away, cocooned within the bedcovers, soothed with something that once felt like warmth pulsing across his back where Celebrimbor nestled close. An arm was secure around his waist, and absently he tangled his fingers with Celebrimbor's own, staring through diaphanous draperies at a night dappled with silver.

There were no words in the silence. No apologies. Just the flurry of Celebrimbor's breath, the stirring of dark hair; and with each blink, on his eyelids crumbled the ruin of white walls in fire and blood. He clutched onto Celebrimbor's fingers all the tighter.

''I will not let you fall,'' he might have promised, though he should have known that trusting his own words would be folly.


End file.
